[kevingadd]

The existing mechanisms y'all have been using (suppressing posts with many flags or with many comments) seem like they just don't work at the current scale of hacker news even if they did when it was smaller. In particular, the fact that the system(s) were exploited to push a YC survey down on the front page is a bummer - I have no idea where else I'd find out about a YC survey other than YC's website unless I rely on some site like techcrunch to publish a writeup about it days later. (Where will they see it if it gets pushed off hacker news?)

Once a story hits a certain vote threshold it probably needs a reprieve from some of the automated filtering mechanisms, at the very least. Disabling comments in response to flame wars would be much better than suppressing the story itself. Flagging seems good for fighting link spam, but a flagged story with many comments would suggest an intense (and not necessarily heated/flamey) discussion that has value and would naturally attract flags from people with an axe to grind.

[yorwba]

Intense discussion is what https://news.ycombinator.com/active is for. There's also https://news.ycombinator.com/best which (I assume) puts more weight on votes and has less churn. Both still show this submission, although it has dropped off the default frontpage.

Those alternatives should probably be advertised better than just that tiny link in the footer.

If you're only interested in YC news specifically, you can also subscribe to https://blog.ycombinator.com/feed/ . Most of the articles there don't ever make the front page, I think.